I’m a driver. Not in the sense that I drive people around for a living, I just enjoy driving a lot. I guess I could’ve initially said “I enjoy driving a lot.” It’s hard for me to think of times when I didn’t have my license and had to be chauffeured around by a parent. That’s no way to live life.

To get to the point I’m at now, I had to go through driving school TWICE. I don’t think my mom trusted that I would be a good driver right away. Probably because of the time that I pulled onto a main road without stopping, while cars were approaching in both directions.

I didn’t drive with my mom much after that. I think I eventually forced my dad to risk his life and drive with me. I pretty much drove in circles and made him listen to the Chicago soundtrack with me. He had it comin’, he had it comin’, he only had himself to blame….if you’d have been there, if you’d have seen it, I betcha you would’ve done the same!

And all that jazz.

See, I get talked into taking classes easily. I remember freshman year of high school, I was 15 years old before most of the people in my year. My friend told me that I should take Driver’s Ed through the school with her since I was old enough to get my learner’s permit. I got my permit, and the next semester, I was in class with her. My teacher was super old and annoying and always talked about how good his break reaction speed was. Like, who cares?

The best part of the class is that we got to leave school. Driving around was fine, but leaving school was an amazing feeling. In that class I earned the name Lead-foot Lily (It was actually my last name, but Lily sounds better. Don’t you hate when teacher’s refer to you as your last name like you’re in the army or something? ) because, you can guess, I was into going fast and breaking hard.

Do you think the guy that’s driving is nervous because he’s driving without a license plate?

After I was done with that class, my mom enrolled me in a driving class outside of school. My teacher’s name was Mr. Wickersham and he would drive up to my house and I would get in the car and drive around with him and pick up other kids who wanted to die. Wickersham was old and boring. He didn’t give me a cool nickname, but on my sixteenth birthday he took me through the McDonald’s drive thru and bought me a Sausage McMuffin. So he definitely had some credibility.

I waited a month after my birthday to get my license. I was nervous. Everyone at school liked to tell horror stories of which DMV was the worst and which ones made you parallel park and which ones made you pull out into oncoming traffic. I was a pro at pulling out into oncoming traffic so I picked that one. Everything went smoothly and I almost hugged the guy that was testing me when he said, “Alright, you passed.” I even opened the door for him we we went back inside.

Ever since then, I’ve been a driving machine. Lead-foot or not, I like to drive around, listen to tunes, and sing by myself. It soothes me. It’s a new form of freedom when you’re sixteen. You can just get up and go whenever you want. Unless you don’t have a car. Then nothing really changes.